XPost: alt.politics.socialism.trotsky, alt.politics.sociaism   
   From: dwaltersMIA@gmail.com   
      
   Stop the Massacre of the Palestinian People!   
      
   Declaration of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International   
      
   Sixty years ago, the partition of Palestine was imposed by the United   
   Nations at the behest of imperialism and with full support of the   
   Kremlin bureaucracy. This partition was basic to the birth of the State   
   of Israel in 1947- 1948. Now, 60 years later, 1.5 million Palestinians   
   locked up in Gaza are again the victims of horrendous massacres.   
      
   For days on end, the Israeli army planes, helicopters, and guided   
   missiles have been bombing the Gaza Strip. A ground invasion has further   
   left hundreds and hundreds of dead and injured. The death and injury   
   tolls mount by the day. Among the victims are children, women and old   
   people who’ve been hit inside their homes, targeted by relentless   
   aircraft bombings.   
      
   In the daily newspaper Haaretz on December 29th, Israeli journalist   
   Amira Hass wrote, “It is not Hamas but all the Palestinians who are   
   targeted by the bombings on Gaza.”   
      
   The first wave of bombings was launched when Palestinian schoolchildren   
   were leaving their schools to walk back home. When the aircraft dropped   
   their bombs, there were thousands of children in the streets. The few   
   press correspondents on location in Gaza -- the State of Israel has   
   forbidden access to any new journalist since the beginning of the   
   military assault -- report the horrifying sights. “Corpses are lying on   
   the ground with their identity cards in full view to enable their   
   families to recognize them. That was what met the eye in the middle of   
   the day at Al-Shifaa hospital in Gaza, where things were a regular   
   pandemonium,” reports the correspondent of French newspaper Le Journal   
   du Dimanche on December 28th. “In the middle of maimed bodies, wounded   
   people are lying on makeshift stretchers, families are crowding the   
   hospital to try to identify a corpse or find a relative reported   
   missing, doctors are scrambling to cope with whatever means they have”.   
   Essentials are direly scarce because of the blockade imposed for months   
   by the Israeli State. The lack of medicines, blood, anaesthetics and   
   surgery equipment dooms the more seriously wounded to certain death. One   
   of the doctors at Al-Shifaa bitterly remarks: “We can only try to save   
   those who have a chance to survive”.   
      
   For 60 years -- since the partition in 1947-1948 and the brutal and   
   bloody expulsion of the Palestinians, turned out of their own land, of   
   their villages and homes; from the massacre perpetrated by the Jordanian   
   army during Black September to the one committed by the Israeli army at   
   Sabra and Shattila in Lebanon in September 1982 -- there has been an   
   endless string of massacres. The Palestinian people have been victims of   
   the horrendous consequences of an international consensus agreed on by   
   all the major imperialist powers -- among which U.S. imperialism ranks   
   first -- and the Stalinist former Kremlin bureaucracy with the blessing   
   of the United Nations and the complicity of bourgeois Arab governments.   
   This has been a consensus based on the negation of the right of a   
   people, the Palestinian people, to live free and sovereign on their own   
   land.   
      
   In Washington: “President Bush had been informed in advance,” the French   
   newspaper Le Figaro reports, and he made sure “not to ask the ally of   
   the United States to immediately interrupt its attacks” considering that   
   “Israel is entitled to defending itself”. The population of the Gaza   
   Strip is indeed being bombed with U.S.-made bombs dropped from F16   
   fighter planes.   
      
   As for the president elect, Barack Obama, his main adviser, David   
   Axelrod, reaffirmed that “the special relations between the United   
   States and Israel will continue,” declaring further “that for the time   
   being, there is just one president speaking on behalf of the United   
   States and that is current President, George, W. Bush.”   
      
   In Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, people are massively taking to the   
   streets to shout their anger in front of the slaughter once again   
   inflicted on the Palestinian people and against their own governments'   
   complicity.   
      
   Even inside the borders of the State of Israel, tens of thousands of   
   young Israelis are challenging the ban set by the "national unity" and   
   have marched against the intervention while the Palestinians “of the   
   interior” have organized strikes and demonstrations marking the unity of   
   the Palestinian people.ized strikes and demonstrations marking the unity   
   of the Palestinian people.   
      
   But the facts cannot be evaded: The editorialist of Le Figaro had to   
   acknowledge: “The sound of weapons have been the leading voice heard in   
   the Middle East for 60 years and words have finally become nonsense.   
    From attack to response, from escalation to conflagration, the same   
   words are being repeated again and again, ever delaying the hope of a   
   durable peace.”   
      
   “The hope of a durable peace!” That is beyond doubt what the Palestinian   
   people and what peoples around the world crave for as they are aware of   
   the heavy threat posed to humanity by the crisis that rocks the system   
   of exploitation based on the private ownership of the means of production.   
      
   Stop the massacre now!   
      
   For its own part, the Fourth International has ceaselessly affirmed that   
   there is only one way to avoid being caught in the trap of endless war   
   spreading to the whole region; there is only one way to bring peace   
   founded on the respect of the rights of peoples: It is to reject the   
   partition of Palestine imposed by force, imposed in 1947- 1948 by the   
   United Nations and all the governments.   
      
   There will be no peace as long as the Palestinian people are doomed to   
   stay in exile in refugee camps scattered across the region, to be cooped   
   up in those open-air prisons that go by the name of Gaza and the West   
   Bank, or to be second-rate citizens within the borders of the State of   
   Israel. The right of the Palestinian people to return to their lands is   
   incontrovertible.   
      
   This right will never be able to exist and be abided by within the   
   borders of either of the so-called Palestinian "state", in Gaza or the   
   West Bank, fenced in by a 12-foot-high security walls and barbed wire,   
   dotted by Israeli army check-points and relentlessly moth eaten by new   
   plantation colonies. The right to return is a right that is incompatible   
   with the existence of a theocratic Israeli State founded upon terror and   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)